Progressive Politics in Minnesota, the Nation, and the World

Questioning Facts For Profit

SB55 would have allowed teachers to essentially teach anything they want as science as long as they used certain language.

Fortunately, this didn't make it out of the education committee. But the idea that it was even proposed leads me to wonder what is wrong with our legislative system. And this is really not new....

Since 2014, at least 60 "academic freedom" bills -- which permit teachers to paint established science as controversial -- have been filed in legislatures all over the country. Louisiana passed one in 2008, and Tennessee did, too, in 2012.

Academic freedom? From what, established scientific fact? This doesn't happen in other countries because they do not let corporations challenge things like this.

From the cigarette companies multi million dollar campaign to pretend cigarettes don't cause cancer...to the oil and gas corporations remake of their pollution driven profit machine....it is an assault on factual information.

And it is fueled by the Republican Party. In a Congress bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists, legislation is not driven by factual information - it is operated on the assumption of profit first.

And President Trump is one of the many results of this insistence on questioning science and facts. He has taken advantage of the question marks that corporations have managed to buy in regards to established science.

Advertising "alternative facts" is the new way to avoid making business clean up or make the workplace safer or prop up a dying market. Buy your way in...destroy the regulatory agencies...it is disgusting how much greed operates in this country.

We are choosing to destroy this planet for a few extra bucks.

Are we really going to allow our education system to be "rigged" into one huge corporate ad buy?